…mozemoua…

Sorry guys, I had been so busy and unable to blog, but here I am… Back to my blogging mode… First of all, I hope all is well, I haven’t been back to my blog since the last time I had post up anything, but lets hope I find the time to fully blog again. I hate it when I get so busy and blogging isn’t in my schedule.

Anyways, here is a picture of my friend’s helmet that I did.. I like it and at the same time I hate it. I know I should had framed it differently and move the helmet closer to the other end of the frame instead of the far right. But for now here is the picture of Brian’s helmet as my advertisement photography. Will have to go out and shoot a new one, but for now, critique please.

Remember the picture I had taken when I went to Yosemite National Park in California? well, this image is going to go into my portfolio (at least for now). Here are two images, they are the exact same photo, only printed differently, or I went at it with two different approach. The first one was the HDR (High dynamite range) I had done originally for this image, I like the concept, I like the look, only the images was a little, humm you can say muted. So my teacher wanted me to change it into either black and white, or infrared, and I had choose to reprint the image in infrared with the HDR, boy I have to say that the Infrared with HDR is a whole lot better than the plain HDR itself. With the Infrared, the image popped out more and has more dept to it. I went in and burn and dodge some spots on the half dome to bring out the contrast.

The second image reminds me of work done by Ansel Adam, although I would never be as great as him, he had done one too many wonderful Yosemite pictures.

as a viewer, which image do you like better? remember, they are the same photo, just two different printing approach.

Here is a project I did for my photo history class, this project is called “Cyanotype”. It is a type of photography that was done back in the earlier days of photography, it is a very simple and easy way to process negatives into positives, but with a blue color cast to the image. I actually like this blue color cast for some reason.

What we did was we order the Cyanotype kits of the internet and then mix the kit in the dark then turn our digital files into black and white negative images and print it out into a transparency(or if we want, we can use our 4×5 black and white negatives). Once the digital negative is printed, we take a sheet of 100% water color Rag paper into a dark room and spread the chemical (from the kit that we had mixed) and let it dry, we took the easy way out since time was limited and put the sheet into our dryer at school for a faster drying processes, than we place the negative over the dried spread chemical and have a piece of large glass over it with claps to make it stable and set it in the sun until the lime green chemical turns a dark shade of green. Once the chemical turns to the dark shade of green we bring it back into the building and let it sit under running water, the water will wash away all the access chemical and our image will be process. To have a deeper and richer blue, we mix a little peroxide with water and spread it over our image, that will give the photo a deep rich blue color.

Below are two images I had done, first one is the negative of my uncle picking rice from the rice field, it’s a photo I had taken about 3 years ago. Below that image is the cyanotype that I had done. I had left it in the sun a bit too long thus his face didn’t show much details besides the outline of his face.

Second is the digital negative of the photo I had taken of Yosemite national Park when I went to California last summer. I thought I had exposed this one almost perfectly, I shouldn’t had given it that much sun, but I did although I love the contrast of the cyanotype in this image. On the right side of the photo, you’ll see a line going straight through the cyanotype, that was the line from the glass, my piece of glass wasn’t so big thus it had shown a line where the piece of glass ended for this image, again I still like the image as it is..

The chemical only cost $20 and it makes a great amount of images, I am thinking about buying some more chemicals and make some cynotype as gifts to friends and family. You can actually be creative and do a lot of fun things with this process. Let’s see if I can find time to get creative with this process, as for now, enjoy the images.

Here is a photo of my friend Brian [again], it’s a redo for my Section “C” for my portfolio developed class. I am still currently working on my portfolio so lets hope that by the end of fall quarter 2010, I hope to have a full developed portfolio book with great images, actually I have to get my portfolio done by then for our portfolio show, lets hope I can make it til then. I still have math to worry about. For now, it depends on my math, if I can pass my compass math test and take Math 101, pass that, then I am on my way. This is what I get for putting Math off for so long!

Anyways, the image has a blue color cast to it, instead of being black and white, it’s because I kind of played with it and messed up my settings, but when I print it out, it looks really good. I used the printer profile “let printer determine color” so I control the color cast from the printer, not through photoshop. It’ll be too confusing trying to explain this so I’ll just leave it at that. But yes, when it’s printed out, it’s a pretty neutral black and white image.

Humm::::: Sorry my boarder is HUGE, didn’t mean to make it that big.. anyways, this photo was  for my Advance Commercial photography class, the assignment is entitled “Soft Goods” and my soft good happens to be a baby’s converse hence the teddy bear is place in the background to weigh in the itty bitty shoe. My friend Lynda was kind enough to lend me her baby’s shoe. I am sure Hunter didn’t mind too much. ehehe.

I am very proud of this photography, I thought it was very good, I saw a few flaws here in there, but it’s okay, I like the outcome of the photo. This photo was done with a 4×5 view camera in chrome (color films).

Two weeks ago we had shot our food photography, our program had collaborated with the culinary arts program  and had a day of food and photography. The week before this photo shoot we went over to the culinary arts building and met our chiefs. We then pick a dish that we’ll photography and then meet that particular chief who is making our dish and we discuss what we wanted to do and what not. I had a salad called “The Starbust Salad” which was consist of spinach, strawberry, grapefruit, and a dressing with poppy seeds. My chief did an awesome job with her designing this dish for me to photography. Once all the students are done we went to the kitchen and ate the food that was prepared (the untouched portions of the many dishes that was made).

My original Chrome is a bit too dark, but I was able to scan it at school, lighten it up and use it. We are required to turn in our chrome (4×5 color film) and then make either two digital prints or print from our chrome for our chief that had prepared our food and for the instructor chief. I decided to print my chrome for them.

All in all this assignment was very challenging because we are unsure how our food was going to look like, we only know the name of the food and what it is, it depends on our chief to do the designing of our plate as we were required to focus our 4×5 ready for our food. It was very hard to focus when we are unsure of how our food is going to look like, the color, the size and etc. But overall, I think I did a good job. It was a great experience and very challenging.

This photo of Brian was taken for my portrait assignment, I like the subject matter and the location we can do so much with it, but with the horrible day, I’ll have to admit we didn’t get too many shoots. The sun was not on our side!! We shot this photo on a Sunday, it had snowed the Friday before and lasted all night, that Saturday, the sun was up, but it was freezing cold, then Sunday came and it was just a horrible day to go out and shoot. But nonetheless, I have a great idea for another photo shoot with Brian, only this time it’ll be in the studio so I can control the light and not depend all on mother nature. Let’s hope we can do this shoot soon, I cannot wait to put this idea into action…

I had a super crazy, tiring awesome barefooted adventurous day today with fellow classmates Ally and Amy!! I had not had this kind of fun in a while and I have to admit, today’s trip was well worth the lack of sleep, the super long drive with all the mileage I had put on my RSX and the pain I’ll be getting tomorrow. We had planed this trip to Providence Canyon in Lumpkin Georgia for almost a month now and today was the big day. Last night I went to bed at about midnight and gotten up at 3am this morning, met the girls at the Publix in Lawrencville and off we went. It had taken us a little over 3 hours to reach this amazing and breath taking Canyon, the drive to the Canyon was nice, there was hardly any cars at 6am so the drive was very safe.

Once we got to the canyon I was supposed to be Ally’s model but after some shoots we all decided to just forget it and got all dirty. We all took off our shoes and squeezed it all in my little backpack then starting hiking up stream and then we also started climbing the awesome canyons, yes all this barefooted!

Took us a few tries before we were able to get this jump down correctly with the self timer on my camera.

Us ladies before getting back in my car, look can you tell we were tired as heck?

Seriously, what is up with me and all these baby photo shoots? Can’t help it that I have two friends who gave birth right around each other and one 4 month prior, these kids are too cute so I just had to spend some camera time with these adorable babies! I know I had already taken pictures of baby Cameron, but then this is the second attempt at it. I was not very successful yet again, but this time, baby Cameron was pretty good and photogenic! Well after we lay him on his chest that was when he started to get a bit cranky, nonetheless, he did an awesome job!

This weekend I was able to check out the JTL lights from school and took pictures of my cousin/aunt Pakou Moua’s adorable son Aries Fang. These are not the best but it’s something we quickly put together. Shooting kids is hard, but shoot kids under 1 years old is harder.

Enjoy these pictures of Aries Fang.